Archive for the ‘Language’ Category

Over the years, I have caught various snippets about children—almost uniformly young boys, I believe–being raised with Latin as their first language, or at least an L1 from a very early age. I have never cataloged these efforts in a systematic way, though, until now.

Probably the two most famous Neo-Latinists raised in the language are Michael de Montaigne and Mogyorósi Árkád—who later moved to the U.S. and gave himself a good, strong, respectable American name: Arcadius Avellanus. John Stuart Mill has also been mentioned, but according to Wikipedia he didn’t start studying the language until the ripe old age of 8.

But I have heard stories of other classicists raised in lingua Latina, and wish to keep this as a repository for such tales and accounts, as well as progress for anyone raising their kid with Latin as L1 in the 21st Century.